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Join us Saturday, March 29 at 10 am for Tillamook County’s version of “Civic Saturdays” with Jim Heffernan hosting. The sermons explore new and better ways to be a citizen. They are aimed at developing “citizenship muscle. We will need “muscle” to bring power back to “We the People”, where it belongs. Each sermon functions as a stand-alone sermon. Don’t worry about missing earlier sessions.
This week’s sermon , number 10 of 19, is “A Thanksgiving Recipe” and is 35 minutes long. It will explore 5 topics; remembering requires forgetting, yearning requires yielding, seeing requires unseeing, believing requires skepticism, and persuading requires being persuadable. We can talk about the sermon afterwards, or not.
Zoom link – Invite link for Saturday, March 29, 2025 @ 10 AM
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88905106346?pwd=TEaw5qfSN2X5UoxBHgZSF7UsqwMugD.1
Recordings are available for those who are unable to attend the zoom. Contact me at codger817@gmail.com and I’ll e-mail one to you. Recordings also available for earlier sessions.
Transcript for sermon 9 from March 22.
9. GRATITUDE, LUCK, RISK
Washington Hall • Seattle, WA October 1, 2017
HENRY DAVID THOREAU- From his lecture “Civil Disobedience” First delivered in Concord, MA 1848
I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year-no more-in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then….
I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men who I could name-if ten honest men only -ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.
I think it’s rather fitting that we should be meeting on a Sunday today, at the time when many others are watching the NFL. Because on any given Sunday, as they say in pro football, anything can happen. Especially when the president of the United States is on Twitter.
What I hope happens today is that we’ll make a little sense out of all the nonsense, and a bit of hope out of the raw cynical hypocrisy of our times.
I’d like to reflect on three simple ideas this afternoon: gratitude, luck, and risk.
Let’s start with gratitude.
My friend C. Terry Warner is an eighty something retired professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University. Some of you have heard me talk about his classic book Bonds That Make Us Free. Its core insight is that at every scale of relationship, we fall into a cycle of collusion, in which I accuse you in order to excuse me. When in my heart I know I’ve done something wrong, I avoid blame by casting blame on you for something else. You then return the favor. Warner’s book explains so much about our politics today. It explains almost all of Twitter, especially Twitter commentary about, say, the flag. And its core prescription is that the only way to break this cycle is to set in motion a counter-cycle of responsibilitytaking rather than responsibility-shirking.
Well, earlier this year I decided, after quoting Terry Warner seemingly every other day, that I should reach out to him. I emailed him, told him how much my work and life have been shaped by his book, and asked if we could have a call. We did. It was nice. I sent him my new book on citizen power, which he read and sent me a letter about. Then this summer Jena and I were in Utah to visit Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and so we arranged to meet Terry and his wife, Susan, at their home in Provo.
They are a devout Mormon couple married for several decades, with ten kids and fifty-plus grandkids, and he’s a former teacher of Mitt Romney. Jena and I are an irreligious Seattle couple married for three years, each with a daughter from a prior marriage, I a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. We got on famously. We ate cookies and ice cream that Susan had made. We talked about art, acting, phenomenology, political philosophy, German and French intellectual history, missions and legacies both secular and spiritual.
We were there for just ninety minutes. But that face to-face visit opened something up for which I am profoundly grateful. It has made Terry and me much more frequent correspondents. It has also made us mutual mentors. What a gift it is to learn from an elder-and to betold that he is learning from you. That is priceless.
Our friendship has gotten me thinking about the nature of gifts, and the meaning of gratitude. Gifts, properly understood, are not transactions. They are an exchange-a perpetual exchange, if you’re lucky. In this sense, power is a gift. Every form of power we have as citizens-our voice, our presence, our ideas, our wealth, our beliefs, our creativity, our vote-exists not so that it can sit idle and inert but so that it can be circulated.
Exchanged. Given-not thrown away heedlessly. And re turned-gratefully.
In a healthy community, the circulation and exchange of power generates gratitude all around. In a healthy society, people remember that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. We give to get and we get to give. But in a sick society, it’s not that way. In fact, one clear symptom of sickness is a corruption of the language and spirit of gift exchange and gratitude.
Let’s go back to the NFL and black athletes taking a knee during the anthem. One of the most striking things about the media firestorm that followed Trump’s tweets last weekend was how many white so-called conservatives, on cable shows and talk radio, brought up the topic of gratitude. They did so in a peculiar way. What they said was, “These millionaire athletes-instead of grand standing, they should be grateful they get to play a game for a living. They should be grateful to the country that lets them do that.”
This idea-that black people shouldn’t protest racial injustice because they are just lucky to be here and, by the way, some of them are millionaires-is, in a word, un-American. It’s as un-American as a U.S. president getting elected with the help of Russian disinformation.
More than that, it’s a weaponization of gratitude. It’s a case of the entitled and privileged expecting, not getting, then eventually demanding tribute from those for whom they think they’ve done a favor. Colin Kaepernick may indeed feel blessed to live in the United States and to do what he is doing to push the United States closer to its stated creed of justice for all. But he owes no expression of gratitude to anyone but those who have taken a knee with him.
When gratitude is expected, it is no longer a gift. It becomes a tax. This spirit of smug oblivious entitlement animates the Trump proposal to cut income and estate and corporate taxes for the very wealthy. It’s odd that white heirs to vast fortunes aren’t subjected to lectures on Fox News about how grateful they should be just to be here, and how perhaps they might express that gratitude by being willing to pay a higher rate. Instead, we get from the trickle-down crowd this line: I’m a job creator. You’re lucky just to be in my presence; don’t make demands of me. Don’t ask me what I will do for others. Just thank me. Send me your tribute, your tax breaks, your bundled dollars.
Well, I have no such gratitude to offer. Maybe the GOP will win this round, will apply their tools and sources of
power effectively enough to enact unnecessary tax cuts for the rich. They will not be able to compel me to be thankful for it. I will feel lucky, though-lucky that I’m in a society where I can mobilize countervailing power-people power-to remedy the damage wrought by selfish, self-dealing plutocrats.
So now let’s consider this topic of luck.
The white-privileged and the trickle-downers have a strange blindness when it comes to luck. Then again, we all do. Our profoundly unequal society, with meritocratic gold-star collectors like so many of us here today, conditions us to believe that what we have is what we earned. That individual hard work and virtue, or the lack thereof, explains our place in the world.
That’s a bunch of crap.
Let me take inventory of my luck: I had the dumb luck to be born here in the latter third of the twentieth century, and to grow up in a time of peace and prosperity.
I had the dumb luck of parents who, while immigrants, had social capital and education. I had the dumb luck that when my father became unlucky and was diagnosed in 1977 with end-stage kidney disease, he lived in the land of Medicare and therefore could get equipment and training for home dialysis. He lived another fourteen years and we were not bankrupted by those years.
I had the dumb luck of being in an IBM family in an IBM company town when IBM was at its very peak: summer jobs for children of employees, college scholarships as well, health and dental insurance, pensions.
Yes, I worked hard. I worked hard enough to get into a college that then compounded my good fortune by opening the entire world to me, a world of unending dumb luck and connections. But countless others worked just as hard who didn’t have the deck stacked in their favor this way. Some are teenagers in Tacoma today. Or single moms in Ohio. Or old men in Yemen. Talented but not connected. Talented but unlucky. I’m talented but stupidly lucky. I’d be an idiot if I didn’t admit that-or if I were to resent you for pointing it out. And by that measure (among others), we are governed today by idiots.
During the so-called debate last week over the so called plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, one Trump aide said to the media that he was offended that healthy people should have to subsidize sick people they didn’t know. In other words, he was offended by the very moral and operational principle of insurance itself. The great thing was that this set off a cascade of commentary on social media in which everyday Americans began their tweets, 11I was a healthy person subsidizing sick people until…” Until I broke my leg. Until my hus band got diagnosed with cancer. Until my son was in a car accident. Until, in short, badluck struck.
My dad loved the old 19 30s comedian W. C. Fields. He loved to quote a piece of dialogue from a W. C. Fields movie called My Little Chickadee. “Is this a game of chance?” asks a newcomer. “Not the way I play it,” answers the con man. We laugh at that, but that’s the way it feels to most people today. Luck seems in short supply to the many. Education and health insurance are more costly and contingent. The line between holding on and falling apart is thin and ever shifting. There are no IBMs anymore, not in the sense of a social contract and safety net. You don’t get a fair chance anymore. The game of social and economic opportunity, from tax breaks to college admissions, is rigged to favor those who already have opportunity.
So when I take inventory of my luck, am I agreeing with those righteous dog-whistling Fox News commentators who tell us Kaepernick and LeBron James should shut up and count their blessings? No. The reason I detest those dog-whistlers is that they do not see their own luck. They do not count their own blessings-their own unearned parcels of power, as subpar white men hired by a TV network to make subpar white men feel great again. They only want, in scolding the NFL players who take a knee, to pretend to be the source of other people’s luck. They know nothing of true gratitude.
Robert Frank, in his book Success and Luck, describes a variety of social psychology studies that show the more self-aware you are about how chance and randomness have shaped your successes and opportunities, the more likely you are to find lasting happiness and purpose. And the more likely you are to support and promote the common good, even at some personal cost.
Which brings me to the final topic for today, which is risk.
Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in 184 8 after having spent a night in jail in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay a poll tax. He had refused to pay because he believed that to pay was to support a national government that tolerated and sustained slavery, and that had just gone to war in Mexico to build an empire. He could not abide complicity in such sins. The Civil War was still thirteen years away but the impending crisis of disunion was visible to anyone who cared to look. Thoreau looked, unflinchingly. He was fussy, self-righteous, cranky, inconvenient. But he was definitely woke. I want to share a passage in his talk about the push for abolitionism and reform in the late 1840s:
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not pre pared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.”
“Cost what it may.” Those are four big words. Let them sink in. Ask yourself: What are you willing to spend for justice? What are you willing to risk?
Perhaps it is true that the United States today does not face as foundational a moral evil as slavery. But we do face a living legacy of white supremacy. I’m talking about the white supremacists who don’t carry torches. Those who perpetuate the positioning of whiteness as the social default: in medicine, in law, in education, in art, in philanthropy, in health care, in media.
You may, if you are white, agree that the unearned and compounding advantages of being called white should eventually be wound down and dismantled. But imagine that “eventually” is now. What are you willing to give up? A promotion? An internship for your kid? A low marginal tax rate? The dividends from the family wealth that began to accumulate with your grandfather’s GI Bill? A personal comfort level on your street?
But maybe “What are you willing to give up?” is the wrong question. Or only half the question. The other half is this: What can you imagine gaining? How can you imagine advancing by yielding? Because a system of white supremacy that must unrelentingly dehumanize
nonwhites also unrelentingly dehumanizes whites. You have nothing but this emptiness to lose. You have your entire humanity to gain. The ending of whiteness as the default setting in America is not zero-sum. It is a positive-sum proposition.
“Cast your whole vote,” Thoreau wrote, “not a strip of paper merely but your whole influence.” Let me ask you: What is your whole influence? It is your art, your friend ships, your privilege, your comfort, your assumptions, your reputation, your connections. Cast that vote for economic and social justice. Cost what it may.
Real justice is not cheap. We can argue about the pros and cons of Kaepernick’s choice to kneel. But we cannot argue the fact that he has paid a price for his choice. He has been willing to risk his reputation, his wealth, his prospects for employment.
True gratitude costs something. Saying “Thank you for your service” to one of the million people who’ve done sixteen years of warfighting for us is gratitude on the cheap. So is letting them board the plane first or ap plauding them during the seventh-inning stretch. True gratitude means calling for a draft, or demanding higher taxes to pay for the “war on terror,” or pushing, as GOP Senator Rand Paul did recently in a lonely gesture on the Senate floor, for an end to the open-ended authorization of military force enacted after 9/11. For an actual debate about what we’re willing to spend in blood, treasure, and legitimacy for an endless war against an ineradicable tactic.
If you’ve seen the engrossing, heartbreaking Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War on PBS, you realize how the absence of such a reckoning can be corrosive to a country. In that era, both the young people who answered the call to fight and those who organized protests against the war were willing to take great risks to uphold their ideas of true patriotism.
So what are we willing to risk?
The reason I believe in progressive taxation is not because I love taxes but because I believe in a higher principle of progressive contribution. Of time and talent. The more you have, the greater a share you should share. But unlike the taxman, I don’t compel you. I invite you.
And I want to let you in on a little secret: To pay your share is not a burden. It is a liberation. This is one of the many things I’ve learned from Terry Warner.
I was not raised in a church or in any faith tradition. And Terry and I have never spoken of his faith and his eldership in the Mormon Church. Except for this: when we were having ice cream and cookies, he and Susan described at length the missions they still go on, all over the world, serving and building and circulating their power and their know-how and relationships to benefit others. Not as charity but as responsibility. Not as a duty but as a right. As a form of freedom, properly understood. And he has pressed me since then to examine my own work in the world more closely. More intensely. He has done this so that he might press himself to do the same.
Let’s make three commitments then, together, so that we can all navigate the game of chance we call life. To exchange gratitude like a gift. To circulate good luck rather than hoard it. To take a risk with your own capital so that it may help another prosper.
These are the acts of grown men and women. These are the choices citizens make. These are the bonds that make us free.
